Star Trek: Embracing Its Alternative Life Forms

There are hours of weirdness to watch in Star Trek, and this includes some of the most peculiar (and ridiculous) aliens sci-fi has to offer.

Five hundred twenty-four hours, give or take a few minutes—that's approximately how long it would take you to watch every single minute of Star Trek produced by Paramount since 1966, up through 2009's Star Trek reboot movie. (The brand is now owned by CBS Television Studios, but Paramount has rights to make movies.) That includes five TV series (totaling 716 episodes over 30 TV seasons) plus 11 feature films—and that doesn't even count the animated series, fan films, novels, video games, or the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness.

That stacks up to about three weeks' worth of enjoyable science fiction—and several hours that are, let's be honest, just terrible. No TV show or movie gets it all right (well, maybe The Wrath of Khan...) and Star Trek proves that over and over. For every season of Trek on TV, there are a few clunker episodes we're still expected to accept as canon to the mythos. And hell, there are several entire seasons worth ignoring. (I'm looking at you, Next Generation, season one.)

With the debut of Star Trek Into Darkness upon us, we're celebrating both the greatness of this franchise and the out-and-out odd. To do so, we present to you our collection of the strangest characters to grace the Star Trek screens. Some are weird because they're so obviously non-human—and that can lead to some fascinating ways of looking at the human condition. Others are just strangely...lame.

These creatures deserve some attention. After all, we can almost guarantee you will never, ever see them again. Even if they're strange and beloved, it's their peculiarity that will keep them off screen—though maybe they'll make it to a novel or two. But when it comes to the bad-strange, Trekkies have no problem trumpeting the low points of a show they love. Such lows are worth wallowing in. After all, no franchise is perfect (cough-Star Wars prequels-cough), but we can love it despite that.

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Metrons and Gorn

Metrons and Gorn

Metrons, also known as "cosmic David Bowies," is yet another omnipotent race. This one decided humans were savages, and so were the reptilian Gorn. Naturally, the Metrons made James T. Kirk and the Gorn captain fight to the death. But Kirk is no killer (this time). He spared the Gorn captain, so the Metrons transported Kirk and his ship 1,600 light years away so they wouldn't get any icky savagery on them. In the end, Metrons: bad, Gorn: cool. The latter even came back in Star Trek: Enterprise, and the latest Star Trek video game, so William Shatner and the Gorn could meet again. The Metrons... who cares?